Scrunch!

Mark Simonson

The power-user kit.

Wow! That's amazing. Had no idea such a thing existed.

Ray Larabie

I suspect that for a whole generation of us, making missing letters out of others on a Letraset sheet was the gateway to becoming interested in type design itself.

Or the caveats of using free fonts.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Kent Lew said:

I suspect that for a whole generation of us, making missing letters out of others on a Letraset sheet was the gateway to becoming interested in type design itself.

For me it was missing writing systems on my computer.

Jacob Casal

@Nick Shinn If the broad end was for the general transferring and the ball intended for making sure finer details stuck, then what was the spoonbill brandisher for?

Kent Lew

The spoonbill covered a range, sort of in-between. It was more all-purpose, in my experience. Used in one orientation, you got a moderately broad surface; turned over, you could use the tip for more directed pressure.

Nick Shinn

The tip of the spoonbill is smooth but more pointed than the ball, so you can manipulate it with great precision—when carefully rubbing down the “v” part of a “y” while leaving the tail on the backing sheet!

Adam Ladd

As one who was not practicing in this era, I'm curious if those of you who were, miss it? (i.e. using your hands and tools more to craft a design)

Mark Simonson

I do, but I think it's telling that, even though I still have a pile of Letraset and other transfer lettering sheets and the tools to use them, I haven't used any of it in my work since before PageMaker and Illustrator 1.0. It was the best way to accomplish what I wanted to do at the time, but then something even better came along.

I think people with budgets that made Letraset attractive were among the first to embrace desktop publishing. Those with budgets that afforded them access to type houses were not so quick to make the switch.

Cory Maylett

I miss the tools and all the processes involved. But all the little scars on my fingers remind me that I don't miss the X-Acto knives. I'm also surprised that most of us survived the chemicals: fixer, fixative, Crystal Clear, rubber cement thinner, etc.

Mark Simonson said:

I think people with budgets that made Letraset attractive were among the first to embrace desktop publishing. Those with budgets that afforded them access to type houses were not so quick to make the switch.

In some cases, I think it was the other way around. I remember the first Macintosh I used on a regular basis for real work. It was Macintosh II that, counting the software, laser printer and scanner we bought, cost the company around $13,000. Taking inflation into consideration, it would have been twice that figure today.

Anyway, there were no imagesetters at the time, and it was all a matter of printing things out on a 300dpi B&W laser printer. We even tried making color separations that way, then transferring the paper output to film to be stripped. 

Mark Simonson

I'm sure that was true for some. For me, I got by with my original 128k Mac (upgraded gradually to a Mac Plus) and a nearby Kinko's for the first few years.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

(Duly switching to old fart mode...)
I remember the first time I had my first outline font (made on an Amiga 500, with a floppy drive and no hard disk) output on an imagesetter, in 1987. It was a place called Fontographics (of all things) at the NE corner of Olympic and Robertson...

Nick Shinn

As one who was not practicing in this era, I'm curious if those of you who were, miss it? (i.e. using your hands and tools more to craft a design)

I started out on Macs with a mouse, but switched to a tablet almost immediately (c.1990)—there was a big scare about carpal tunnel syndrome at the time. So I’ve been crafting graphics and type by hand, with a pen, all along. I still sketch with ink on paper, but not finished art.

Kent Lew

I do sometimes miss the tools and process also.

Although I haven’t done much graphic design in quite a while, when I do/did, I still like to create concepts and rough comps by hand. Partly to maintain skills, but more importantly because it sets up a more appropriate expectation, IMO.

The danger of concepting and comping with digital layout tools is it appears more finished than intended, and it’s too easy to get bogged down in details prematurely (both in terms of creation and review/evaluation).

Russell McGorman

Kent Lew said:

...

I suspect that for a whole generation of us, making missing letters out of others on a Letraset sheet was the gateway to becoming interested in type design itself.

Oh yeah. There was that. 

NickCurtis

The ball burnisher always did the trick for me.

The best way to get Letraset to stick to itself was to hit the already-set letters with a shot of fixative (McDonald Photo Products Matte Fixative was my go-to brand). The fixative bonded the already-pressed letters to the page and added a bit of tooth for the subsequent letters to grab onto.

And 1/8" white cellophane tape was a paste-up artist's best friend.